Everything changes (the word “everything”
has just changed as the
word “change” has: it now
means “no change”) so
quickly that it literally surpasses my belief,
charges right past it
like some of the giant
ideas in this area.
I had no beginning and I shall have
no end: the beam of light
stretches out before and behind
and I cook the vegetables
for a few minutes only,
the fewer the better. Butter

Fairy Tale

The little elf is dressed in a floppy cap
and he has a big rosy nose and flaring white eyebrows
with short legs and a jaunty step, though sometimes
he glides across an invisible pond with a bonfire glow on his cheeks:
it is northern Europe in the nineteenth century and people
are strolling around Copenhagen in the late afternoon,
mostly townspeople on their way somewhere,
perhaps to an early collation of smoked fish, rye bread, and cheese,
washed down with a dark beer: ha ha, I have eaten this excellent meal
and now I will smoke a little bit and sit back and stare down
at the golden gleam of my watch fob against the coarse dark wool of my vest,
and I will smile with a hideous contentment, because I am an evil man,
and tonight I will do something evil in this city!

It’s a joy to be subtracted from the world. Holding my son’s naked body against my own, all I feel is what he is. I cannot feel my own skin. I cannot feel myself touching him, but I can recognize his hair, the heft of his body, his warmth, his weight. I cannot measure my own being, my subtle boundaries, but I know my son’s arms, the drape of his legs, smooth and warm in a shape I can measure. I have become such a fine thing, the resting-place for a body I can know.
•
I bought eggplants at the farmer’s market, long and slender, the deep purple reserved for nightshade, castor, the garden’s poisonous brood. I was admiring the eggplant’s waxy skin, its tender flesh, when a farmer thrust a tomato into my hand. I bit into the firm, red fruit, belladonna’s passionate cousin, and ate it under his watchful eye. He looked at me and nodded, as if he knew how far I’d go for pleasure.
•
I know that bird calling out in the night. This isn’t the first time he’s mistaken moonlight for sunrise.
•
She handed me a piece of salmon, ruby-hued and redolent of wood smoke and the sea. Moist, silky with oil, I ate it slowly, and told her, I’ve only eaten salmon like this once, years ago on the Skagit River. She said, this salmon was caught on the Skagit. She went on, but I wasn’t listening. I was thinking of eagles in the cedars; raw oysters, fennel bread, salmon and white wine; oyster shells in the middens; ice breaking under our boots on the trail to Fishtown.